Bangalore: Facebook is the latest addition to the expanding enterprise customer list of Microsoft in recent times.

Facebook has adopted Microsoft’s Office 365 and Azurecloud offering, which clearly suggest it’s a strategic initiative the social networking giant has taken till date, in view with the benefits cloud offers to enterprises and businesses in terms of work functions, productivity and cost as well.

Given this move, from CIO and IT organization perspective it’s very crucial to know and understand the core rationale behind Facebook’s key decision to adopt Microsoft’s offerings.

Addressing workforce and productivity

“The IT organization at Facebook is focused on having the most productive workforce possible and the foundation for Facebook’s continual innovation is our ethic of collaboration that empowers everyone to bring their best ideas to the table,” Facebook CIO Tim Campos wrote in a blog post.

“To enable our productivity, IT at Facebook provides our people with the best tools available. Tools that can mean the difference between just having an idea and bringing that idea to life,” Campos added.

Since Facebook users are spread globally it’s certainly a challenge for the IT unit ensure the social networking site well equipped to support the global users in such a massive number round the clock. This means Facebook’s IT unit and staffs need to work more in a collaborative way.

“The people who use Facebook are distributed around the world, and to support them, our people are globally distributed as well. We facilitate their productivity by letting them choose the device and platform that is most effective for them. We collaborate on everything online—no files, no fragmented information stores—and we provide our employees with the ability to work anywhere and in any way they want,” Campos explained.

Empowering distributive and collaborative work functions

Given this distributive and collaborative nature of functioning, certainly the IT needs to be flexible and has to be available all the time across platforms as per employees’ needs, which does mean enormous amount of pressure on the IT unit with almost no room for failures as well as keeping the tight checks on security.

“All of this means that our IT has to be flexible and available over the web, on mobile and across platforms—wherever our employees need it. Enabling this mobility requires a secure environment that defends against cyber attacks and protects mobile devices, especially if a device gets stolen or hacked,” Campos shared.

Facebook has more than 13,000 employees across the global and it aims to make the social networking site accessible to more than a billion users every day.

Challenges and pressures on IT

On the IT challenges and pressures Campos informed, “My team is responsible for balancing these often competing pressures. Productivity is our most important charter, but security and efficiency are also paramount. We need the right technology to empower employees, while also ensuring our business is safe at all times.”

In fact, according to Campos this is the key reason, why Facebook has deployed Office 365.

“It a mature and comprehensive platform, it meets our stringent security standards, it complements how we work with intelligence, flexibility, and it is continually evolving. It is globally deployed, accessible on every mobile platform we support, and it is secure,” Campos said.

“Most of all, it enables our productivity with powerful new capabilities for employees, such as the ability to share and edit traditional Excel documents at the same time, across devices,” Campos explained in-depth how Microsoft’s offering matched Facebook’s technology and work-functioning requirements.

In fact, this is what most CIOs today look for while selecting any technology for their respective organization and how it can fit into the work culture and improve the productivity.

While Campos pointed out various benefits and insights on Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Microsoft Graph offered in terms of collaboration and intelligence in his blog post but he also hinted that Facebook will continue to leverage and look forward to Microsoft for new capabilities in future as well.

“As Microsoft continues to innovate with Office 365, we will continue adding and rolling out more services that have value for Facebook. In that way, we’re not just buying the capabilities that Office 365 offers today. We are also buying capabilities that Microsoft will offer over time, and expect even greater things to come,” Campos concluded.